BL/Rover What Went Wrong?

[sierraman]

The one car they made that to me made sense and kept the wolf from the door was the Rover 200/25. At this point they had the chance to jettison the wood and chrome, this was the 90’s remember. But no, it had to have a digital clock inlaid in some plywood. Because that’s what we’d always done...

[Mrcento]

7 minutes ago, sierraman said:

While Issigonis was jizzing up and down the corridors of Longbridge they designed the 1800, then discovered it was too wide to go over the steel bridge. Instead of resolving this like most people would by widening it, they drove trailer loads of bare steel bodies down the road. 

This is actually no worse than one of the biggest fails of today. Nissan with their D40 Navaras that like to snap in half due to rust.

The root cause?

The chassis is made in Barcelona.

The corrosion treatment building is not in the same building as the Chassis assembly one.

They are transported on trucks untreated and left outside awaiting treatment.

That'd be bad enough in itself, but it's in the fucking docks. Right next to all the salty sea air.

And folk wonder why they rot inside out?

[AnthonyG]

1 hour ago, New POD said:

Engineers and accountants both being allowed to decide what customers wanted? 

I don’t think accountants had any say in what happened until things had gone way, way, too wrong. 

Then it was crisis control to keep the lights on, really. 

No money to redesign the MGB for new minimum height lighting regulations in its biggest market? Well we’ll just to have jack it up then, ruining what handling it did have.

The guys designing the umpteenth Datsun Z/Toyota Celica in 1975 must have pissed themselves laughing in the geisha bar that night. 

[Sheefag]

1 hour ago, Rod/b said:

WDIAGW @Sheefag?

HWKA

[Leyland Worldmaster]

The Leyland 500 Series. Nobody has mentioned that yet! 

Had it been left as a bigger capacity unit- as originally designed and successfully tested- things might have worked out better. 

A change to the capacity- at what  seemed to be a very late stage of development-was due to the requirement for an engine to weigh less than a tonne fucked things up big time. 

The 500 had some extremely advanced features. I've a soft spot for it- memories of Leyland Nationals being given the beans by enthusiastic drivers- but objectively it was an expensive mistake. 

Edited July 1, 2021 by Leyland Worldmaster
Paragraph added.

[garethj]

I think they made different mistakes at different times, it really was a clusterfuck.

In the 60s they tried to develop too many cars, it’s easy to imagine managers there putting on a trilby and sucking on their pipe, saying “A Riley man wouldn’t be seen dead in a Wolsley” and so they developed lots of cars with a limited budget with the inevitable consequences.

I think they did a shit job of what a business needs to do when you have multiple, struggling brands and factories.

The contempt for the customer seems clear too, as is a lack of respect for what the competition was doing.  “It doesn’t matter what Johnny Foreigner does, our chaps would never buy a German car”.  An attitude that might have been true for all the chaps who had ‘a good war’ in the late ‘40s but those customers see what other manufacturers are doing and they’re not going to give away their money to get an inferior product.

The lack of export markets must have hurt too, I’m thinking of how many Volkswagens were sold in the US because they were suited to long highways.  The Morris Minor could have done the same (both cars had advantages and flaws) but the Minor with its low gearing just doesn’t feel as comfortable on a long freeway journey.

[sierraman]

Wasn’t the truck and bus part of the business profitable? 

[Ian_Fearn]

I don’t think I’ve seen anybody talk about the entry into the Common Market?

My understanding is that this had a huge impact in the 70s. During the 60s the UK car industry fought for tariff free access to Europe. It was of course vetoed by France.

During the 60s BMC were producing far more globally competitive cars than they were by the 70s when we finally did join the Common Market.

Once tariff free imports arrived here, they decimated the UK produced share of the market.

[sierraman]

A lot of the cars we were trying to sell to Europe simply didn’t appeal on any level to the buyers there. The Germans for example were not going to consider in any way shape or form a Maestro/Montego over a Golf. I can’t ever recall seeing one in anywhere but the U.K. 

[warch]

There is an assumption that the British were backward in developing new cars or updating existing ones, but the problem was often that profitable elements of BL like Rover or Jaguar saw all their profits and therefore development budgets fed back into propping up less successful parts of the organisation. Land Rover developed several concepts for a radical clean sheet replacement for their utility vehicle which could have competed with the new Toyota Landcruiser but there was no budget to push this forward. They also experimented with fitting a V8 in their existing vehicles during the late 60s for the same reason, in order to make a vehicle more suitable for Australia or the US, it took ten years to bring this to the marketplace by which time Toyota and the American brands were firmly established. 

The unions didn't help matters either, there was enormous arrogance and high handedness in the way some workers and shop stewards conducted themselves. I remember reading about a service engineer who was touring the Leyland tractor factory at Bathgate. He noticed that some internal components visible on the line were fitted incorrectly and pointed this out to a worker. The worker's response was to tell him to eff off and that it was none of his bloody business. Vehicles built at the height of BL in the mid 70s were generally awful in terms of build quality, they were made by disinterested workers who had a poor or antagonistic relationship with their management.

[Bren]

11 hours ago, horriblemercedes said:

You could write a thesis on this. An incredibly large topic to examine with so much more than meets the eye. I might attempt to start writing down some of my thoughts on Monday if I have time - it has the potential to take hours or days at least! 

This. You could go on forever.

[lesapandre]

Just a few key strategic reasons without even considering the individual cars:

1. Up to the mid 1960's BMC were paying out big  dividends to shareholders in quite a macho culture when more funds were needed to be reinvested into the business - with predictable results.

2. Woefully poor management - BMC was run by a very few senior executives who as they reached retirement age in the1960's left little in the way competent successors or management structure. There was also quite a lot of wasteful squabbling between individual divisions and executives. 

3. Inability to seriously crack export markets - leading to poor returns on model investment - Peugeot 504 sold 3 million  total cars compared to the comparable sized 1800 at 386,000.

4. Poor market strategy - George Harriman BMC CEO had recognised by the mid-60's that BMC would not be able to out-compete Ford and GM on their own terms and wanted to take the conglomerate into a more high quality/high tech direction as VW had done in Germany in relation to Ford and Opel. Abandoning this by Leyland management took the company straight back on to the US companies turf where it did not have the resources to compete effectively in the long term.

5. Underestimation of the foreign competition once import tariffs were dropped on foreign cars coming into the UK in the 1970's

6. Woeful industrial relations and worker management over decades Post-War.

7. Too many factories and convoluted and therefore expensive supply chains.

8. Ineffective cost management and under-pricing of cars to keep up with the competition.

9. Poor market research and a misunderstanding to what were car buyers needs - for example much later than Fiat or Renault with a small hatch-back - so in effect they were trying to sell cars not so many people actually wanted/desired.

10. Over-confidence and under- delivery by Donald Stokes.

The AROline site has lots of the gory detail...

[wuvvum]

1 hour ago, lesapandre said:

9. Poor market research and a misunderstanding to what were car buyers needs - for example much later than Fiat or Renault with a small hatch-back

Ahem...

[garethj]

3 minutes ago, wuvvum said:

Ahem...

But even that misses some of the point of a hatchback.  Why drop the lower half of the tailgate so you make it more difficult to reach into the boot?  Slightly less shit on a Range Rover where at least the load space is higher up.

If you look at a poster about handling boxes, that’s basically how not to do it

 

[wuvvum]

That setup has been used on other cars that are generally considered hatchbacks though.

[sierraman]

I don’t think you’d get a balanced view on AR Online. All you get on there are the people who thought they were misunderstood and how in any just world the Rover 75 would have smashed the competition. 🤣

[lesapandre]

1 hour ago, wuvvum said:

Ahem...

Quite correct Wuvvum...you are absolutely right - but they took that model out of production in 1968. Another of their failures was the inability to capitalise on so many really great innovations. In many ways the clean styling of the A40 was better than say the Allegro - it's much more the direction VW went with architecture of the Golf.

Again looking at why things went wrong - BMC used Pininfarina to style their cars very well, moving styling back in house can also be seen as mistake by BL. The original VW engineering  prototypes leading up to Golf were frumpy and done in-house by VW but they did not make that mistake with the look of the actual car which went to Giorgetto Giugiaro at Italdesign.

They also kinda missed the demographic change to bigger supermarkets and DIY stores where the hatchback was so useful. It was pretty poor product planning...but really the whole thing was death by a thousand cuts - probably no one thing sunk them except the inability to make a profit

[lesapandre]

15 minutes ago, sierraman said:

I don’t think you’d get a balanced view on AR Online. All you get on there are the people who thought they were misunderstood and how in any just world the Rover 75 would have smashed the competition. 🤣

These series of articles are pretty fair:

https://www.aronline.co.uk/history/british-leyland-grand-illusion-part-one-export-die/

Corporate failure is not new or unique to BL of course - it's in the news most days with retail at the moment...different sectors get hit at different times and in different ways - it's particularly industries with high capital costs (cars/steel and now retail) where it is so difficult to change quickly in answer to market conditions.

[beko1987]

When I was a kid growing up all the rover cars on TV were at the lower end of vehicle heirachy... 

Little metro's, rover 200's etc as the hapless idiots car/joyridden crushed fireball thing in casualty/eastenders. 

By the time I found out their alright* from these pages there's not many good cheap ones left! 

[garethj]

19 minutes ago, wuvvum said:

That setup has been used on other cars that are generally considered hatchbacks though.

True, but just as many people go in for incest, doesn’t make it right 😀

It reduces the likelihood of clouting your head, but as far as getting stuff in the boot, I’d say it’s worse than a conventional hatchback.

A bit like as someone said earlier; hydrogas was all very well but it’s less reliable and more expensive than coil springs and performs no better.

[sierraman]

I always thought the Rover 75 was a good opportunity but they insisted that it had to hark back to the 1950’s for some bizarre reason. Most of the people who had the archetypal Bank Managers Rover P5 in the sixties were either dead or about a hundred years old. I don’t know whether they actually did any market research or did it and ignored it but they felt they had to hark back to an age 40 years previously. All the target market for those type of cars were dying out. The customers wanted quality feel Germanic interiors and a dynamic ride. The 75 offered nothing in that respect. Another one where they thought they knew what was best and ended up laughably wide of the mark. Round about the same time they were absolutely skint but still wasting money developing the QV sports car with DeTomaso or the V8 75, they knew nobody would buy them but they were insisting on wasting time and money on something that would just lose them money. 

Perhaps deleting the wheel arch liners and the sound deadening or fitting those crap Goodmans radios were paying for this nonsense.

[mk2_craig]

17 minutes ago, sierraman said:

BL/Rover What Went Wrong?

Has there ever been any subject which has had more words written about it by British motoring journalists?

[lesapandre]

Probably not - but like Snow White or Cinderella it's a story that bears repeating....

I should think the DeLorean debacle runs it a close second.

[Rocket88]

15 hours ago, sierraman said:

Issigonis was a nightmare really, his attitude stank, in his mind if you had an accident it was your fault, you should have swerved. That to my mind should have been enough to have seen him gone by the mid 60’s. 

Absolutely right. Genius? Probably….arrogant arse… definitely. Designed cars with total disregard for the end user, either from an owning or maintenance perspective 

[JimH]

Most of the things people talk about are symptoms rather than the disease. My own view is that management was allowed to hide from repeated failures by politicians who were not keen on the fall out from facts being faced.

By the time they started to work out what to do it was far too late.

[lesapandre]

This BL training film of the 70's gives an impression of the era. All so much more individual labour intensive than today.

 

[JimH]

That film is smashing not least because I love the idea of a Quality Control Nasty. I also like the idea that BL knew that everything they touched turned to shit but were utterly powerless to do anything about it.

A lot of the 1970s training films that came out of BTF have the same feel.

[Asimo]

49 minutes ago, mk2_craig said:

Has there ever been any subject which has had more words written about it by British motoring journalists?

Yes. test-track laptimes and related ”performance” wank.

[goosey]

41 minutes ago, lesapandre said:

This BL training film of the 70's gives an impression of the era. All so much more individual labour intensive than today.

 

To be fair the girl in the office not being able to type works orders correctly and then walking across the shop floor while the blokes on the production line “check her out “ seemed to cause more problems than any Industrial Action from the workers😂

 

theres also another good BL quality film where one of the issues is the bloke weighing the pistons for the Rover V8 is using a machine so old the markings have worn off the dials, I think it’s called “The Circle “ or something like that 

[Motown]

A cumulation of things really 🤔

First and foremost not learning from past mistakes....

If Rover were good at one thing is was making the same mistakes over and over again whether it be quality/build control issues or pissing large amounts of money up the wall. Rover certainly had the veteran status and were deeply experienced when it came to motor manufacturing with many years under there belt. They very innovative with regards to research and engineering for a lengthy period of time and in the very early days they even produced the Rover safety bicycle which is recognised as the first modern bicycle. Ofcourse none of this accounts for shit if you don't move forward and progress taking note of what you have learnt along the way. I don't know if Rover were so old they woke up one morning with Alzheimers and had forgotten where they'd come from and who they were but they acted more like a millennial than the strong experienced old guard.

Secondly business relationships

Am of the opinion Rover made SOME of there best cars during the RHONDA years. Rover really had a chance to get back on track and really make something of themselves again with regards to the car manufacturing and sales. I would even go as far to say if the partnership lasted Rover might still be here today and Honda wouldn't be in the shit they are in now.

Thirdly the British public

Ive never been one to believe Rovers are ONLY bought and driven by old folk...  I am in my late thirties and i have always bought or owned Rovers i know plenty of others of various age brackets buy them as well but truth of the matter is only a relatively small amount of the British public were buying them.

The majority opted for other manufacturers which were often built abroad you only have to go back to the late 90s early 2000s and most people were of the opinion Rovers were slow and looked old. Bizarrely most of the people denouncing Rovers were armchair critics and had never actually driven one its now 2021 and my 1991 Rover 827 fastback will happily stay on the tail of most modern cars.... Slow and old i think not sir! 

Finally BMW

Closing the door after the horse has bolted is a term often attributed to BMWs handle of Rover and i agree but we must not forget how BMW stripped Rover of its best assets... The mini... The 1 Series... so on and so fourth!